How Does The Boys End in the Comics?

Prime Video’s The Boys and its spinoff, Gen V, are a little different from the comics they’re based on, but they’re still farming a lot from the source material. So, if you’re wondering how The Boys ends in the comics and are prepared for some potential spoilers, here’s the answer.

What Happens to Homelander and The Seven

As with the show, Garth Ennis’s The Boys sees Homelander become progressively more unhinged. It seems as if he’s having blackouts and is sent pictures of himself doing some pretty horrific things, things he doesn’t remember doing. That, in turn, pushes him to act more violently when he’s “in control.”

He was always a bad person, but he goes full-on psychopath. Right under Vought’s nose, he enlists a massive army of superhumans and storms the White House, killing the president. But the U.S. Military is prepared for such an eventuality, partly due to intel from The Boys. Using weapons designed to home in on Supes, they annihilate all of Homelander’s army.

Meanwhile, Butcher heads into the White House to confront Homelander, the man who was responsible for his wife’s death. Except he wasn’t. It’s revealed that Black Noir is actually a more powerful Homelander clone, designed to kill him if he went rogue.

But when that never happened, he decided to make it happen. Noir is the one who raped Butcher’s wife and committed all those atrocities in the photographs. Homelander takes him on, but while Noir is badly hurt, he’s able to kill Homelander.

Butcher flees and guns down the wounded Noir as he exits the White House before finishing him off with a crowbar. At this point, the only surviving members of The Seven are The Deep and Starlight, both in hiding. Queen Maeve was killed by Homelander, and the rest were killed off in earlier issues.

Still, that’s it, right? There’s no more Seven, superheroes are irrevocably tainted in the public’s eye, and Vought can’t hope to come back from their golden boy killing the president. However, that’s not good enough for Butcher.

What Happens to Butcher and The Boys

In a previous Russia-based arc, The Boys discover a new strain of Compound V that can be remotely triggered to kill any superhumans who’ve taken it. While The Boys thought they’d taken care of it, Butcher had other plans.

He’s used it to set up a worldwide network of bombs that, when triggered, will kill anyone with a notable level of Compound V in their veins. And since Compound V is in the food supply, that means a lot of non-superpowered casualties, too.

To prevent them from stopping them, the end of The Boys comics sees Butcher kill Frenchie, The Female, Mother’s Milk, Vogelbaum (the inventor of V), and The Legend. He also killed Mallory earlier on. Hughie tries to stop him, but instead of a prolonged super-brawl, the pair fall off the Empire State Building.

Related: The Boys: What Do Homelander and Sage Want to Do With Tek Knight’s Prisons?

They’re both injured, but Butcher is paralyzed (possibly permanently) from the neck down. He begs Hughie to kill him before he’s arrested. Hughie refuses until Butcher pretends he killed Hughie’s parents. Enraged, Hughie stabs Butcher, who dies from the injury.

Vought finds a fall guy for the super-invasion, but their superhero division is basically dead. Hughie tells Stillwell, their representative, that if they ever try to get superheroes in the military or make a play for power, he will execute Butcher’s plan and kill all the Supes. The issue also has Hughie paying tribute to his fellow fallen Boys before reuniting with Starlight, finally getting a happy ending.

What Happens in The Boys’ Sequel Comic

While that’s where the original run of The Boys comics came to an end, writer Garth Ennis recently produced an eight-issue follow-up called Dear Becky. This sequel takes place ten years after the end of the original and sees Hughie coming across Butcher’s diary. The comic jumps between the present and, via Butcher’s diary, the past.

It doesn’t shake up the universe of The Boys, feeling more like an extended epilogue. Here’s a summary of what we learned from the comic:

• Superheroes are essentially gone, and the world is as normal (if that’s the right word) as ours.
• Hughie and Annie are still together and get married at the end of the comic.
• Hughie’s parents have passed on, peacefully, in the intervening ten years.
• Vought’s James Stillwell (equivalent of the show’s Stan Edgar) lost his mind and just wanders around a pineapple farm, rambling quoting economist Milton Friedman.
• We witness the moment when Butcher decides he’s going to kill all the superheroes.
• As in the show, the memory of Becky is the only thing holding Butcher back.
• Kessler, who’s a world away from the show’s Kessler, now runs a consulting company and seems to be doing well for himself.
• Kessler explains that The Boys can never be public knowledge because they could be used to paint Homelander’s attempted superhuman takeover in a positive light.

And that’s how The Boys ends in the comics. Noir may not be a Homelander clone in the show, but it’s still easy to see a path where Antony Starr’s character goes as far as his comic counterpart. If you’re wondering how else the show differs from the comic, read on.

The Boys is streaming on Prime Video.

The above article was updated on 7/9/2024 by the original author to add information about The Boys’ sequel comic Dear Becky.